to the reclaim the night collective
February 12 2011
Comment received anonymously on my previous post:
The Reclaim the Night poster is not yours - it is the property of the collective. You agreed to design it but that doesn't give you ownership or indeed the right to sell it on. For someone who claims that women's rights is one of her interests, this completely undermines the feminist collective. I would appreciate it if you stop selling the posters for your own personal profit and direct the funds to the reclaim the night collective
What can I say?
1. I designed the poster out of my own experience. I painted the original banner with my own materials. This was prior to my offering it to the collective of that year for use that year to promote the event that year.
2. I paid to have the banner professionally photographed.
3. I paid to have the posters printed.
Who are you? And who is the reclaim the night collective? And how long have you been participating on this collective? And is this collective active?
From my recollection the Adelaide Reclaim the Night fell by the wayside during the first half of this decade in favour of commemorating the 16 Days Against Violence Against Women. There was an attempt by bureaucratic paid public servants to maintain the apparatus but due in part to the reluctance to undertake work that was unpaid, and in part to the difficulty in organising alongside unpaid grassroots women it gradually withered away. If there has been a resurgence of interest in Reclaim the Night I welcome it.
It's not the first time I have been accused of undermining "the feminist collective" and I admit I have had no training in feminism. I don't know what this means. I don't know what I have done to undermine it. It feels confusing. It triggers my inner conviction that I am a fraud, that I am dishonest and stupid. Perhaps I am. Perhaps you would care to explain to me what you mean and how I could change my ways?
A little herstory -
I joined a reclaim the night organising collective in Adelaide and designed a poster for that year's event. Perhaps you recall it? It was landscape orientation, painted joyously in blues, purples and reds, showing shoes around the border, and advertising that year's Reclaim the Night march. I enjoyed being part of the organising collective and participating in a event that had become integral to my identity and that I had been faithfully attending for several years.
The following year I again participated in the organising collective. At that time most collective members were students at Flinders and Adelaide Universities. I was very excited by a banner that I had painted of a poster design I had entered in a competition many years earlier for Reclaim the Night. That original design was pencil and it was the wrong dimensions and it was not chosen as the winner of the competition that year.
I offered my newly painted revamped design for use to promote that year's Adelaide event. I did not offer it in perpetuity and it never crossed my mind that someone might have considered that I had.
[I do not claim that poster is representative of Reclaim the Night or that no one else could design a poster to better represent Reclaim the Night. I welcome the expression by others to represent the event and all that it stands for. I may be misguided in my feminism but I am not that arrogant.]
I was so scarred by my experience that year in that organising collective that I stopped attending Reclaim the Night events at all. I was lied to, unsupported, attacked and generally so abused by some of the women on the collective that I decided it wasn't really safe to participate anymore.
I had had the idea that the Reclaim the Night event might be revitalised if it had some publicity prior to the march, to remind Adelaide's women about the march. The collective agreed to support a poster launch, and then failed to support it in the event, to the extent that at the poster launch, there were no posters. It was a farce. Leaving aside my personal humiliation, the lack of support by the collective members for something we had collectively agreed to do, undermined our collective efforts to gain momentum and participation in the march that followed.
At that point I embarked upon finding another way to participate in changing the world and acting against violence against women; particularly sexual violence. The result of this was The Reclaiming Anthology, published a few years later. The book is organised around the poster design, with a section for each window of reclaiming as represented on the poster.
I later paid out with my own money to have my poster reprinted for the purposes of promoting the book and the poster together. No one has requested to use the poster to promote subsequent Reclaim the Night events. It has fallen into herstory. It has fallen into disuse. Why not onsell the pieces of pretty paper to other women around the country who might gain something from it?
The design is my personal creative property. It was not commissioned by the collective of that year or, indeed any collective. It is wrong for the collective to lay claim to it now, and it rankles that someone would do so anonymously with such an intrinsic lack of integrity.
By all means make contact with me if you value my poster and wish to use it. By all means acknowledge the work that I did. By all means treat me as a human being and respect the fact that I am at least attempting to live and deal openly in this world.
